The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC ) is an international federation of National Adhering Organizations working for the advancement of the chemical sciences, especially by developing nomenclature and terminology. It is a member of the

International Science Council The International Science Council (ISC) is an international non-governmental organization that unites scientific bodies at various levels across the social and natural sciences. The ISC was formed with its inaugural general assembly on 4 July 20 ...

(ISC). IUPAC is registered in

Zürich Zürich () is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zürich. It is located in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zürich. As of January 2020, the municipality has 43 ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

, and the administrative office, known as the "IUPAC Secretariat", is in Research Triangle Park,

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. This administrative office is headed by IUPAC's executive director, currently Lynn Soby. IUPAC was established in 1919 as the successor of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry for the advancement of

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

. Its members, the National Adhering Organizations, can be national

chemistry societies Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the elements that make up matter to the compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, properties, ...

, national

academies of sciences An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...

, or other bodies representing chemists. There are fifty-four National Adhering Organizations and three Associate National Adhering Organizations. IUPAC's Inter-divisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (

IUPAC nomenclature A chemical nomenclature is a set of rules to generate systematic names for chemical compounds. The nomenclature used most frequently worldwide is the one created and developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). T ...

) is the recognized world authority in developing standards for the naming of the chemical elements and compounds. Since its creation, IUPAC has been run by many different committees with different responsibilities.IUPAC Committees list
Retrieved 15 April 2010 These committees run different projects which include standardizing

nomenclature Nomenclature (, ) is a system of names or terms, or the rules for forming these terms in a particular field of arts or sciences. The principles of naming vary from the relatively informal naming conventions, conventions of everyday speech to the i ...

,Interdivisional Committee on Terminology web page
Retrieved 15 April 2010 finding ways to bring chemistry to the world,Chemdrawn
Retrieved 15 April 2010 and publishing works.Pure and Applied Chemistry Editorial Advisory Board web page
Retrieved 15 April 2010Evaluation Committee page
Retrieved 15 April 2010 IUPAC is best known for its works standardizing nomenclature in chemistry, but IUPAC has publications in many science fields including chemistry, biology and physics. Some important work IUPAC has done in these fields includes standardizing

nucleotide Nucleotides are organic molecules consisting of a nucleoside and a phosphate. They serve as monomeric units of the nucleic acid polymers – deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), both of which are essential biomolecule ...

base sequence code names; publishing books for environmental scientists, chemists, and physicists; and improving education in science.IYC: Introduction.
9 July 2009. Retrieved on 17 February 2010. Retrieved 15 April 2010 IUPAC is also known for standardizing the atomic weights of the elements through one of its oldest standing committees, the

Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights The Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW) is an international scientific committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) under its Division of Inorganic Chemistry. Since 1899, it is entrusted wi ...

(CIAAW).

Creation and history

The need for an international standard for chemistry was first addressed in 1860 by a committee headed by German scientist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. This

committee A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly. A committee is not itself considered to be a form of assembly. Usually, the assembly sends matters into a committee as a way to explore them more ...

was the first international conference to create an international naming system for

organic compounds In chemistry, organic compounds are generally any chemical compounds that contain carbon-hydrogen or carbon-carbon bonds. Due to carbon's ability to catenate (form chains with other carbon atoms), millions of organic compounds are known. The s ...

. The ideas that were formulated in that conference evolved into the official

IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry In chemical nomenclature, the IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry is a method of naming organic chemical compounds as recommended by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). It is published in the '' Nomenclature of O ...

. IUPAC stands as a legacy of this meeting, making it one of the most important historical international collaborations of

. Since this time, IUPAC has been the official organization held with the responsibility of updating and maintaining official

organic nomenclature In chemical nomenclature, the IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry is a method of naming organic chemical compounds as recommended by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). It is published in the '' Nomenclature of ...

. IUPAC as such was established in 1919. One notable country excluded from this early IUPAC is Germany. Germany's exclusion was a result of prejudice towards Germans by the Allied powers after

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. Germany was finally admitted into IUPAC during 1929. However,

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

was removed from IUPAC during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. During World War II, IUPAC was affiliated with the Allied powers, but had little involvement during the war effort itself. After the war,

East East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fac ...

and

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

were readmitted to IUPAC in 1973. Since World War II, IUPAC has been focused on standardizing nomenclature and methods in science without interruption. In 2016, IUPAC denounced the use of

chlorine Chlorine is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Cl and atomic number 17. The second-lightest of the halogens, it appears between fluorine and bromine in the periodic table and its properties are mostly intermediate betwee ...

as a

chemical weapon A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a ...

. The organization pointed out their concerns in a letter to Ahmet Üzümcü, the director of the

Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is an intergovernmental organisation and the implementing body for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which entered into force on 29 April 1997. The OPCW, with its 193 member ...

(OPCW), in regards to the practice of utilizing chlorine for weapon usage in Syria among other locations. The letter stated, "Our organizations deplore the use of chlorine in this manner. The indiscriminate attacks, possibly carried out by a member state of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), is of concern to chemical scientists and engineers around the globe and we stand ready to support your mission of implementing the CWC." According to the CWC, "the use, stockpiling, distribution, development or storage of any chemical weapons is forbidden by any of the 192 state party signatories."

Committees and governance

IUPAC is governed by several committees that all have different responsibilities. The committees are as follows: Bureau, CHEMRAWN (Chem Research Applied to World Needs) Committee, Committee on Chemistry Education, Committee on Chemistry and Industry, Committee on Printed and Electronic Publications, Evaluation Committee, Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Interdivisional Committee on Terminology, Nomenclature and Symbols, Project Committee, and Pure and Applied Chemistry Editorial Advisory Board. Each committee is made up of members of different National Adhering Organizations from different countries. The steering committee hierarchy for IUPAC is as follows:IUPAC Project Committee
Retrieved 15 April 2010 * All committees have an allotted budget to which they must adhere. * Any committee may start a project. * If a project's spending becomes too much for a committee to continue funding, it must take the issue to the Project Committee. * The project committee either increases the budget or decides on an external funding plan. * The Bureau and Executive Committee oversee operations of the other committees.

Nomenclature

IUPAC committee has a long history of officially naming organic and inorganic compounds.

is developed so that any compound can be named under one set of standardized rules to avoid duplicate names. The first publication on IUPAC nomenclature of organic compounds was ''A Guide to IUPAC Nomenclature of Organic Compounds'' in 1900, which contained information from the International Congress of Applied Chemistry.IUPAC Publications List
Retrieved 15 April 2010

Basic spellings

IUPAC establishes rules for harmonized spelling of some chemicals to reduce variation among different local English-language variants. For example, they recommend "

aluminium Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. I ...

" rather than "aluminum", "

sulfur Sulfur (or sulphur in British English) is a chemical element with the symbol S and atomic number 16. It is abundant, multivalent and nonmetallic. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms form cyclic octatomic molecules with a chemical formula ...

" rather than "sulphur", and " caesium" rather than "cesium".

Organic nomenclature

IUPAC organic nomenclature has three basic parts: the

substituents A substituent is one or a group of atoms that replaces (one or more) atoms, thereby becoming a moiety in the resultant (new) molecule. (In organic chemistry and biochemistry, the terms ''substituent'' and ''functional group'', as well as ''side ...

carbon chain In chemistry, catenation is the bonding of atoms of the same element into a series, called a ''chain''. A chain or a ring shape may be ''open'' if its ends are not bonded to each other (an open-chain compound), or ''closed'' if they are bonde ...

length, and chemical affix. The substituents are any functional groups attached to the main carbon chain. The main carbon chain is the longest possible continuous chain. The chemical affix denotes what type of molecule it is. For example, the ending ''ane'' denotes a single bonded carbon chain, as in "hexane" (). Another example of IUPAC organic nomenclature is

cyclohexanol Cyclohexanol is the organic compound with the formula HOCH(CH2)5. The molecule is related to cyclohexane by replacement of one hydrogen atom by a hydroxyl group. This compound exists as a deliquescent colorless solid with a camphor-like odor, w ...

* The substituent name for a ring compound is ''cyclo''. * The indication (substituent name) for a six

is ''hex''. * The chemical ending for a single bonded carbon chain is ''ane''. * The chemical ending for an alcohol is ''ol''. * The two chemical endings are combined for an ending of ''anol'' indicating a single bonded carbon chain with an alcohol attached to it.

Inorganic nomenclature

Basic IUPAC inorganic nomenclature has two main parts: the cation and the

anion An ion () is an atom or molecule with a net electrical charge. The charge of an electron is considered to be negative by convention and this charge is equal and opposite to the charge of a proton, which is considered to be positive by conve ...

. The cation is the name for the positively charged

ion An ion () is an atom or molecule with a net electrical charge. The charge of an electron is considered to be negative by convention and this charge is equal and opposite to the charge of a proton, which is considered to be positive by conve ...

and the anion is the name for the negatively charged ion. An example of IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic chemistry is potassium chlorate (KClO₃): Potassium-chlorate-composition

* "

Potassium Potassium is the chemical element with the symbol K (from Neo-Latin ''kalium'') and atomic number19. Potassium is a silvery-white metal that is soft enough to be cut with a knife with little force. Potassium metal reacts rapidly with atmosph ...

" is the cation name. * " Chlorate" is the anion name.

Amino acid and nucleotide base codes

IUPAC also has a system for giving codes to identify

amino acid Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha a ...

s and

bases. IUPAC needed a coding system that represented long sequences of amino acids. This would allow for these sequences to be compared to try to find homologies.Amino Acid Codes
Retrieved 15 April 2010 These codes can consist of either a one-letter code or a three-letter code. These codes make it easier and shorter to write down the amino acid sequences that make up

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...

s. The nucleotide bases are made up of

purines Purine is a heterocyclic aromatic organic compound that consists of two rings (pyrimidine and imidazole) fused together. It is water-soluble. Purine also gives its name to the wider class of molecules, purines, which include substituted purines a ...

(

adenine Adenine () ( symbol A or Ade) is a nucleobase (a purine derivative). It is one of the four nucleobases in the nucleic acid of DNA that are represented by the letters G–C–A–T. The three others are guanine, cytosine and thymine. Its deri ...

and

guanine Guanine () ( symbol G or Gua) is one of the four main nucleobases found in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, the others being adenine, cytosine, and thymine (uracil in RNA). In DNA, guanine is paired with cytosine. The guanine nucleoside is c ...

) and

pyrimidines Pyrimidine (; ) is an aromatic, heterocyclic, organic compound similar to pyridine (). One of the three diazines (six-membered heterocyclics with two nitrogen atoms in the ring), it has nitrogen atoms at positions 1 and 3 in the ring. The other ...

(

cytosine Cytosine () ( symbol C or Cyt) is one of the four nucleobases found in DNA and RNA, along with adenine, guanine, and thymine (uracil in RNA). It is a pyrimidine derivative, with a heterocyclic aromatic ring and two substituents attached (an ...

and

thymine Thymine () ( symbol T or Thy) is one of the four nucleobases in the nucleic acid of DNA that are represented by the letters G–C–A–T. The others are adenine, guanine, and cytosine. Thymine is also known as 5-methyluracil, a pyrimidi ...

uracil Uracil () (symbol U or Ura) is one of the four nucleobases in the nucleic acid RNA. The others are adenine (A), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). In RNA, uracil binds to adenine via two hydrogen bonds. In DNA, the uracil nucleobase is replaced b ...

). These nucleotide bases make up DNA and

RNA Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA) are nucleic acids. Along with lipids, proteins, and carbohydra ...

. These nucleotide base codes make the genome of an organism much smaller and easier to read.Amino Acid and Nucleotide Base Codes
Retrieved 15 April 2010 The codes for amino acids (24 amino acids and three special codes) are:

Publications

Non-series books

''Experimental Thermodynamics'' book series

The ''Experimental Thermodynamics'' books series covers many topics in the fields of thermodynamics.

Series of books on analytical and physical chemistry of environmental systems

Colored cover book and website series (nomenclature)

IUPAC color code their books in order to make each publication distinguishable.

International Year of Chemistry

IUPAC and

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

were the lead organizations coordinating events for the

International Year of Chemistry The International Year of Chemistry 2011 (IYC 2011) was a year-long commemorative event for the achievements of chemistry and its contributions to humankind.United Nations Resolution 63/209: International Year of Chemistry.
3 February 2009. Retrieved on 24 April 2010.About IYC: Introduction.
9 July 2009. Retrieved on 24 April 2010. The International Year of Chemistry was originally proposed by IUPAC at the general assembly in

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese language, Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital ...

, Italy. This motion was adopted by UNESCO at a meeting in 2008. The main objectives of the International Year of Chemistry were to increase public appreciation of chemistry and gain more interest in the world of

. This event is also being held to encourage young people to get involved and contribute to chemistry. A further reason for this event being held is to honour how chemistry has made improvements to everyone's way of life.

IUPAC Presidents

IUPAC Presidents are elected by the IUPAC Council during the General Assembly. Below is the list of IUPAC Presidents since its inception in 1919.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Chemical nomenclature Chemistry organizations International scientific organizations Members of the International Council for Science Organisations based in Zürich Organizations based in North Carolina Scientific organizations based in the United States Scientific organisations based in Switzerland Scientific organizations established in 1919 Standards organisations in Switzerland Members of the International Science Council